


The Beginning Of The Rest Of Their Lives

by cosmofex



Category: Original Work
Genre: Blood, Death, Mental Illness, PTSD, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-23
Updated: 2017-07-23
Packaged: 2018-12-05 17:41:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11583012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmofex/pseuds/cosmofex
Summary: Sometimes when you try on your sisters dress, you realize you are trans.On the other hand, sometimes when you try on your sisters dress, your town is attacked by orcs, your family is executed in front of you, you conceal your identity as the son of the lord who got executed by working as a scullery girl for a few months, all the while enduring daily trauma and exposure to triggers and THEN realize you are trans.





	The Beginning Of The Rest Of Their Lives

The girl was a bit dull, everyone in the kitchen could agree. She was slow at any task they set her, she never responded the first time she was called, and she almost never talked. She would just quietly do a task forever until she was stopped, and if for some reason she ran out of work, she would just stare vacantly into space until given directions.

"She's daft, like Pete down in the village. His dad dropped 'im on his head when he was just a bitty thing, and somethin' in his brain broke," professed Agna. She'd lived in that village since she was born sixty-three years ago, and she knew someone that had been dropped as a baby when she saw them.

"Nah, weren't no bump on her head. Poor thing saw too much when the Horde took over. Right bloody affair that was, no wonder she broke down," said Jamis, the cook. He'd been the one to spot her and bring her into the kitchens after the old lord had been executed along with the family. She'd just been standing there, staring at the old lady's head. So far as Jamis knew, the girl's vacant expression hadn't changed since.

"Jamis, it's been three weeks since that happened. If that was the cause, she'd have said something by now," protested Agna. "Even if it was, she wouldn't have lost the ability to cut carrots, eh?"

"Agna, she's right there. Have some decency, will you?"

Agna scoffed. "She isn't listening, though, now is she? No, she was dropped, sure as sunlight in summer." She turned back to the broth she was working on. "Now remind me what the Boss wanted in here? I never can remember what those brutes want in their food."

"You call them brutes all you want, I'm gonna marry one of those 'brutes' by midsummer, just you wait," piped Margot from the spit.

Agna pulled a face. "Ew, are you really? Isn't that some sort of taboo?"

Margot grinned, sweat pouring down her face from the fire she worked over. "Not bestiality if they're only beasts in the bedroom and the battlefield!"

A chorus of protests from everyone in the kitchen rang out, causing Margot to cackle with glee at their dismay. "Margot, no. Just no." "Why would you- no don't answer that." "Stars above, Margot, they're fucking green and grey!"

Margot shrugged, still chortling. "Don't forget the tusks! Besides, humans and orcs can breed, and their kids come out just fine!"

"How do you know that?" asked Jamis curiously.

"Seen 'em," said Margot. "Last week when we were taking out the harvest feast. Big orc kissed a human woman smack on the lips, and she was carrying a baby. Adorable thing. It looked like that goat of Elen's, all grey with lighter splotches."

Agna, despite herself, was curious now, too. "Did the babe look alright? Well-formed and all?"

"As a matter of fact it did," said Margot. "I went over and took a closer look after we were done getting the food out. Had just the one tusk and it had claws like a kitten's, retractable and all that. He even had paw pads! I asked his mother if he ever clawed at her and you know what she said?"

"What?"

"'Not as much as this one did,' and she pulled a little kid out from under the table, looked about four and he was full human!" Several of the older women chuckled at that.

One of the women who had laughed spoke up. "I remember when Lady Verevaine had little Mishe. The brat scratched her up so much in his first few months she had to bandage her left tit for a week!"

Everyone seemed to start laughing at that, but they were interrupted by a loud clank. Jamis startled and looked for the source of the noise. The daft girl, whatever her name was, was staring at a pot now lying on the floor.

Agna clucked her tongue, and went over to pick up the pot. "Girl, you have got to be more careful. What if that'd had something in it, eh? You'd be burned all to hell, that's what!" She put the pot away, muttering to herself.

"Agna," said Jamis.

"-Can't keep doing this, it's not-"

"Agna!"

"What!"

"The girl!"

Agna turned, and to her shock, saw the first expression she had ever seen the girl make. It wasn't much, just a little droop of the corners of her mouth, a glisten in her eye, but if it wasn't an expression Agna didn't know what was. Then her shoulders started trembling.

"Girl?" asked Jamis, crouching down to be on eye-level. "Are you okay?"

The girl stood there, shuddering now, and her lips trembled, and with that her face crumbled and she burst into hysterical tears. A look of dismay crossed Jamis' face, and he gathered her into a burly hug.

"What on earth- Girl, are you okay? What happened? Oh gods, I never had kids, someone help me here."

Agna had pity on the bewildered Jamis, and took the girl herself. "Jamis, mind if I take her somewhere out of the way? We've got supper in a few hours and a veritable flood of orc men to feed, and me and her will just be in the way."

"Sure, third storeroom is empty until the last of the harvest tithe gets sorted out."

"Thanks, I'll be in there if you need me." Agna carried the still-bawling child into the storeroom, and set her down on the work table. Then she just held the girl, waiting for her to settle down enough to be able to speak through the sobs.

Eventually, the sobs slowed down, and finally stopped. Agna, having had a child or six herself, backed up before the girl could fall asleep on her shoulder.

"Hey, now. Doesn't it feel better to cry it out?" The girl nodded shakily. "Jamis was right wasn't he. You saw something no one not ready for it should see, didn't you." Another shaky nod. "Someone family?" Another nod, and a sob to accompany it.

"Momma," said the girl so quietly Agna almost couldn’t make it out, and she burst into tears again.

"Oh, now that's a damn shame," said Agna. "My mother must've died, oh, thirty-some-odd years ago. Worst day of my life, and considering what happened last month, that's saying something." She waited for the girl to stop crying again.

"Okay, now I know you're awake enough to answer I've got a burning question for you. What is your name?" There was a nearly unintelligible mumble. "Masha?" There was a long pause, then a nod. "Well, Masha, I know it doesn't feel like anything will ever be well again. Mothers are everything. But you're alive. And no matter what, your mother would want you to stay that way. So be more careful in the kitchen, okay? I think you took six years off poor Jamis with that noise. Either that or six pounds, it's hard to tell with him."

Masha gave a tiny giggle.

Agna smiled back. "There it is, I knew we'd find a smile in there somewhere." She pulled Masha into another hug. "Don't bottle it up like that again, you hear? Do it too much and even if your body lives, your mind won't."

Agna set Masha back on the floor, and went to the door. "Now come on, we've got dinner coming and Jamis needs our help.

"Now, I've not been paying attention because I have my own tasks to complete, but if I know Jamis, he's had you washing, peeling, and turning the spit. Did I miss anything?" Masha shook her head. "Well, good. He may be in charge of the kitchen, but he couldn't train a spit-dog and ended up making Margot do it, so I'd hate to see what he would try to teach you. Come here, I'm going to teach you how to make bread that's actually worth a damn."

Agna took Masha's hand and led her to the pantry. The room was lined with shelves, with a heavy work table in the middle. Half the shelves were groaning under the weight of sacks of flour and other ingredients, while the other half held loaves from yesterday or stood empty. Agna snagged a mixing bowl on the way in, one that was probably big enough for Masha to curl up inside. She poured a seemingly random amount of flour in the bowl, and threw in what looked like a lump of already-made dough, a lump of butter, and some water. Finally, she pulled up a stool for Masha to stand on.

"Alright, time to get your hands messy. Start mixing that up, and make sure the starter gets mixed up good too." Seeing Masha's confusion, Agna pointed at the lump of pre-made dough. "Funny thing about bread is it's kind of like beer," she said as Masha dutifully broke up the lump into the mess in the bowl. "Both of them have got to sit for a while before you eat them, and if you eat them before they've sat they don't come out right. Bread comes out as a cracker, and beer comes out as water that tastes like someone's left a barley biscuit in."

At this point, Agna noticed Masha was having trouble with the sheer volume of dough, and started mixing too. "But they've got to sit a long time. Bread's got to sit for a day or two, and beer's got to sit a lot longer. But if you put in a bit of dough you pinched from the last batch just before baking, or a bit of beer just before going in the barrel, they don't have to sit near as long."

She paused to take a gulp of water from the bucket, then poured some more in the bowl. "Now, some people are going to tell you you've got to be precise with how much of what you put in to make bread. But if you do that, you're going to hit middle of the road every time. Not bad, but not great, see? So you guess, and you look at how sticky the dough is, and you pinch your ear."

Masha looked at her doughy fingers, then pulled a face at Agna.

"Not right now, numpty, the dough is too sticky. You wait until all the flour is mixed in, and if it's still sticking to the bowl or table or whatever, you add more flour. If you've got loose flour in the bowl and it's not sticking to the dough, add more water. There, like that. Now tip it out on the table."

Masha looked askance at her new mentor, but obeyed. Agna divided the dough into several lumps, then began kneading one, gesturing for Masha to do the same for another. "This bit here is called kneading. See how there's still bits of dry flour in the dough? Kneading mixes those in and make sure everything's mixed just right. Also, if you don't do it, the bread won't hold the bubbles. It won't turn into a cracker either, so just about all it'll be good for is a door stop." They worked their way through all the lumps, and placed them on a pan near the oven so they would rise.

"Now, before the orcs came, this much bread would be enough for the citadel for a full day," said Agna as she started filling the bowl with flour again, "and everyone else in Odinokigord would make their own. But the orcs are in charge now, and they eat a hell of a lot more than humans do. So we're going to make another two batches. First one goes to the head table, second to the soldiers, third to us humans."

Masha, seeing Agna was occupied with their first bowl, got out a second. She carefully mimicked Agna's technique, and before long they were back to kneading dough. By the time they had finished kneading, the dough from the first batch had risen fully. Agna pulled over one of the risen loaves, then began punching the air out of it.

"We've got to do this part because the dough isn't stretchy enough to hold the bubbles in yet. First rise stretches it out, second one we bake it," she said, and Masha nodded. It made sense. She herself was never really awake in the morning if she didn't get in a good few stretches.

Once she got in the groove of punching and kneading, Masha started to think back on the circumstances that had led her here. She always did the moment a task got repetitive. She could tell it made the other workers think she was stupid or something, but it happened anyways. She couldn't help it.

 

Six weeks ago, nearly to the day. The day started simple, normal. Mishe, son of Lord Mikhaelli of Odinokigord, decided to pass the time his father was out inspecting the City Guard by trying on his older sister's clothes. He knew that none of the other boys in the small outpost village would ever think that this would be a fun way to pass the time. Indeed, the smith's son Ivigny occasionally made jokes about some foreign courts making men dress as women as a form of torture, so Mishe made certain he was never caught. If he was, Mishe was sure he would be cast aside by his father. Lord Mikhaelli was a good father, but he would one day need an heir, and despite having twelve children, Mishe was the only boy who lived through his first year. Winters in Odinokigord were harsh even for the north, and of the twelve children of Lord Mikhaelli, three currently lived.

"I don't understand what's going on with me," Mishe had later said to Ullr, the aged varangian who served as physician to the small town. "Is there some spirit that is trying to put a curse on me? Why do I keep wanting to dress as a girl?"

Ullr had laid a gimlet eye on Mishe, and pulled down an old satchel from a hook set into one of the rafters. From the satchel he took a small clay pot and a brush. Dipping the brush into the pot, he flicked a bit of the powder inside at Mishe.

"Breathe that in through your nose," he said in his deep, gravelly rumble. Mishe took a tentative sniff, and Ullr snorted. "I said breathe it in, not smell it. It's a dried potion. Anything with two minds in it will have the newer of the two shoved out." Mishe took a deeper breath, and nothing happened.

"Hm, not a spirit," said Ullr. "Didn't think it would be, but you asked so I checked."

"Why didn't you think it was a spirit?" asked Mishe.

"Easy. There'd be a hell of a lot more wrong than being a girl with a boy's bits," said Ullr, "like your eyes bleeding, and blank spots in your memory where you wake up with a bloody knife in your hand and half the kitchen staff dead at your feet." Mishe's face went a little green, and he shuddered. "Spirits don't like possessing anything with a mind in it, so if one does it's because either the poor sap being possessed has already lost it's mind, or the spirit lost its. The first is fine, and so long as you didn't know the person beforehand, they're normal. The spirit's just decided to live human for a bit, and they found a body that wouldn't hurt them or be hurt by them to do it in."

Ullr took a gulp of ale, and grimaced. "The second's nasty. They only get that bad if there's something pushing them to it, and the only thing strong enough to do it these days is a wizard that has decided he wants an army and doesn't want to spend gold on it. He drives a bunch of spirits insane, lets them loose in a town, and binds the ones that find hosts to his will. It takes about a week to settle in and get total control, and in the meantime the host thinks they're going insane."

There was a moment of silence as Ullr took another swig, and Mishe stared into the fire.

"But no, you're not possessed," said Ullr, and Mishe sighed in relief. "Might be cursed, though." Mishe's relief vanished.

"Cursed?! What do I do?" he asked in panic.

Ullr pulled a bottle out of the satchel. It was small and shaped like an inverted pyramid, and the clear liquid inside seemed to move at the slightest movement from anything in the room, even though the bottle was held perfectly stable. "Spit in here, shake it up, and drink it," and he passed the bottle to Mishe. He spat, and the liquid turned bright red, then as Mishe shook the bottle, it turned to a robin's egg blue. Mishe drank, and immediately started throwing up. Ullr patted his back until the heaves were done, then mopped up the puddle of blue sick with a rag.

"No green, so there's no curse. Oh, wait here's a bit," said Ullr. He held the rag up, and examined it with a glowing lense. "Nothing about dresses, though. Looks like that brat Ivigni put a hex on you so you'd step in manure every time you passed his place."

"I fucking knew it," mumbled Mishe from where he was curled up on the floor. "There's no way that I'd just happen to step in manure every day for the past week. How long until I stop feeling like a mule caught me in the gut?"

"Few more minutes," said Ullr absentmindedly. "Good news is you've got no malicious magic of any sort working on you. Bad news is there's no cure."

Mishe looked up dejectedly. "So there's no cure?"

Ullr nodded. "No cure. Really there's nothing technically wrong with you, you just  like wearing dresses. Nothing wrong with liking a breeze to air out your nethers. Used to wear a kilt myself, back when I was a raider."

Mishe nodded, but he had a suspicion that Ullr wasn't totally right. There was more to the dresses than he had told Ullr. Mishe just wished he knew how to articulate it.

One chill mid-autumn morning, three weeks after Mishe told Ullr about his strange desire to wear dresses, disaster knocked on the gates, four hundred thousand strong. Most of the colossal army of orcs just marched around the outpost, but a siege of five hundred was left behind, more than the entire population of the village. They broke the gates down after only six swings of the battering ram, and began rounding up everyone they could find.

Mishe had been, at that very moment, hiding in the cellar, wearing another of his sister's dresses and looking at himself in the spare mirror his mother kept down here. He struck a pose, turning this way and that to get a better look at himself. A noise outside the cellar startled him.

" _ If Sis finds me like this I'm dead _ ," he thought, and he hurriedly stripped and stashed the dress behind a crate. Then Mishe realized- he'd left his own clothes back in his room, before running down here when he'd heard the servants cleaning a couple rooms over. He'd thought he'd be caught for sure if he stayed put, and the dress would definitely be found if he'd just changed. So he'd taken one of the "secret" passageways down to the cellar, but on his way down he'd heard furniture being moved back in his room. The entry to the passage was surely blocked. Now he could either go back in his sister's dress, or he could go back naked.

Looking around for any chance at avoiding the inevitable embarrassment, an idea struck him. He quickly looked inside the crates around him, and soon found a crate containing spare servant's clothing. Mishe quickly put it on, and undid the ponytail his hair was in. Thankfully the current servants had only been hired a week ago, when the last batch were hauled off for tax evasion. So long as he moved quick, didn't speak, and didn't look anyone right in the face, he'd be able to get back to his room unrecognized.

Mishe's plan worked flawlessly, and it saved his life. A serving maid saw him, and grabbed him by the arm.

"Come now, dearie," said the maid, rushing for the exit. "They're gathering everyone up, and anyone who tries to hide gets the chop too!"

Mishe was shoved into the crowd before he could say anything, and by the time he'd gotten his bearings, he was at the very front of the crowd. There, right in front of him, was an orc. Tall, brawny, grey-skinned, tusks poking out of the sizes of his helm. He held a battle ax nearly two meters long, and his massive square fingers tapped the haft in absent-minded boredom, and when they did, large claws poked out like a cat's.

And behind the orc, in the middle of the cleared area, were the four members of Mishe's family.

They were chained in a line, each with a burly orc guarding them. More guards stood around them, making certain that they could neither escape nor be broken free by members of the growing crowd. As the influx of humans and orcs slowed to a halt, one orc stepped away from the others to address the crowd. They were taller than any of the surrounding orcs, which put them well above the heads of the humans whose mumbles and mutters began to take on a tone of worry. Their armor gleamed in the sunlight, and Mishe could see rows upon rows of small insignia and marks of rank enameled on their chest.

"Silence," said the orc, and even though they did not speak loudly, every human and orc fell silent as the grave. "I am General Khulan. I am tasked with the conquest of this land, and have chosen this village as my current base of operations. My mages will be erecting fortifications beyond the furthest plowed field. These will be bound by cleared fields stretching three hundred of your meters in either direction. Should any human be misfortunate enough to be found within any of these fields, they will meet a sudden and unpleasant fate." General Khulan paused, and surveyed the uneasy villagers.

"You are nervous," said General Khulan. "That is well. You do not yet know the laws of the empire you now find yourself within. Worry not. For you, the laws are simply your own, with a few minor altercations. The first is that any offence of the law committed by a human upon an orc is punishable by the removal of a finger. If the human-law punishment is deemed to be more severe by a jury of six orcs and six humans, then the human-law punishment will be enacted in it's place. If for any reason there are no fingers to be removed, it is instead to be execution. If punishments exceed the number which the human is capable of being punished for, the excess are instead transferred to their next of kin."

General Khulan turned toward Mishe's father. "Your Lord Mikhaelli finds himself in an awkward position. He has, in the course of his ill-advised defence of this village, caused by his order or by his hand the deaths of fifty-five orcs. Counting himself, his family is numbered five." The general pulled out a massive knife, but though they continued speaking, Mishe did not hear any more. His mother had spotted him, and their eyes had locked.

Lady Verevaine was weeping, but she made no sound upon recognizing Mishe. Her face made no motion, but a glimmer of hope had entered her eyes. Slowly, ever so slowly, she made a small patting motion towards the ground, as she always had when her children were threatening to be noisy around visiting dignitaries.  _ "Be still, don't draw attention," _ said the gesture, and then she slowly brought her hands to her mouth, and surreptitiously blew him a kiss, as she had every night before Lord Mikhaelli proclaimed that Mishe was "too old for such sentimental nonsense." Then her hands fell back to her sides, and her silent tears turned into sobs, and though she turned her head so as not to give any hint as to where Mishe stood, her eyes never left him.

Beyond that, all Mishe could remember was the flash of the General's knife, the silent pressure of the eyes of the full village at Mishe's back, and Lady Verevaine's, his mother's, eyes following him, and her final message.

_ "Be still, don't draw attention. Good night my baby, I love you." _

 

"Masha? Masha, don't cry. Tears don't make good dough. Here, dry those eyes up. It's fair obvious you don't like talking, but cry on my shoulder, it's much less messy than a bunch of bread dough."


End file.
